Grit Lab Report

Hi Thrusha,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were benevolence, achievement, and stimulation.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was conscientiousness.

You said your top three talents were social, spiritual, and analytic.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to apply to med school .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in Podcast .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt Motivated when receiving critical feedback, and Motivated when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .

In one word, you said it made you feel Humbling .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Happiness to grit is a virtuous cycle
Effort has a heavy weight on achievement
Baseline learning rate matters
Effort counts twice
Advice is forward thinking
Stress is a growth mindset
A mentor can really act as a psuedo parent
If I am not for myself, then who am I?

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Justin Kuncheria
Hey Thrusha, I really enjoyed spending time with you throughout this semester. I feel like we always have such fun conversations and laugh about the most random things with each other. I think it's also really sweet that you are so generous with your candy and snacks. I always enjoyed our weekly discussions because it felt like our group dynamic was great and we always had a really fun time. I hope we can stay in touch somehow even after the class ends! I also really enjoyed your discovery project. It was really cool to hear about the work you did for Lung Cancer awareness. The fundraiser you did was incredibly impactful and I really enjoyed the cookies that you made too. I think it's very honorable that you put in so much work to help out a cause that is really important and meaningful for millions of people. I hope to hear more about the work you do for Lung Cancer going forward.
Eesha Balar
Thrusha is a very considerate teammate who listens very well. I also appreciate how open she is about her life in our discussions. When we discussed our gratitude letters, for example, I feel like I got to know her well in addition to her family dynamics. It made for very thought-provoking discussion as we all started talking more about what we appreciate in our family members. In addition, she is clearly very passionate about her work outside of grit lab in the lung cancer realm, which is so inspiring to hear about. Her discovery project was unique compared to other team members' in that it emphasized a larger mission of lung cancer awareness rather than a specific vocation/avocation. I gained a better understanding of how racial/ethnic considerations are embedded in lung cancer epidemiology, especially in Philadelphia. It was inspiring how she attempted to address this by learning more about the issue, through a conversation with PennMed physicians and in raising money towards awareness. She spent 3-4 hours speaking with one oncologist, which was really interesting, in addition to learning more about the issue through TED Talks.
Risa Pollak
I genuinely appreciate your openness and honesty during our discussions. Your willingness to share personal experiences, even when they differed from the group's thoughts, created an environment of trust and understanding. It allowed us to explore diverse perspectives to enrich the discussions, benefiting our whole team. During your Discovery project presentation, I was moved by your initiative for lung cancer awareness as I didn’t know how prevalent and preventable this disease is, especially in Philly. Your passion for the project was clear, and emphasized the importance of choosing a passion that supports a cause beyond yourself, a concept we've explored in class. It was inspiring to hear the tangible impact of your project, including educating others and raising over $700 for your cause. Your commitment to making a difference was evident throughout, and I learned a great deal about effective advocacy and engagement.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.